


maggot

by lejf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hopeful Ending, Kind of a Case Fic, M/M, Pining Sam, Requited Unrequited Love, Self-Hatred, Slightly suicidal but not really, it's magic-influenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:36:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9377012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf
Summary: Living with Dean is more than torture. Sam needs to leave, but he doesn’t, masochist that he is. Or maybe he’s just weak.





	

Sundown, sunrise, sun higher than the moon at noon or sun down for the count because clouds are sweeping in to splash them all with rain — none of it really matters. Each place is the same, Sam thinks, maybe changing schools and faces and names, still swallowed away in the struggle of existing under Dean.

Hone in on one town that’s different, roads in the middle of nowhere going everywhere, power-lines tangled with shoes dangling in them by the laces. The streets are disorderly, twining and thinning, footpaths crumbling, buildings rising around them with lights on but no-one behind their doors. There’s an old lady standing in the middle of the road with her arms at her sides and her head jutted forward in the way the elderly do, just _there,_ staring across the street, still in a nightgown and slippers on her feet as the Impala rattles by. Sam is too perturbed to look.

Rain pitters around them and stains the place with puddles, reflections of a starless sky. Streetlights bloat in the gloom, shadows prowl between buildings and on the underside of their carriage as they pull over at a washed-out motel and get out into the rain, which at some point has grown to a roar, a waterfall. John and Dean stride, heads bowed like worn soldiers facing another battle of weather, jackets shielding the duffles. Sam runs, casting long-legged shadows across the stone-strewn carpark splattered with mud.

Heard someone ask once: does he get more or less wet if he runs? Rain at the top of his head s-1 constant, rain hitting from the side m-1 constant. Meter amount is set, multiply, just a simple linear graph, finds something about it funny because there’s a y-intercept that postulates taking 0 time to get there — if he could hold the world in freeze frame and walk right through, he’d still get wet. Sam imagines that for a moment, t0, and looks back the second he reaches the doors: Dean, glancing to the side because he’s heard something moving out there, in the dark, shirt clinging to his skin and rain, hair all clumped in spikes and so deliciously filthy. If all the rain stopped and held steadfast it’d be glittering like a thousand crystals in a wreath around him and reflecting all the moonlight that glances from Dean in impossible sprays of all colours.

It’s getting cold, so Sam ducks through the doors, water dripping from his hair, heart beating just a little too fast, almost surprised that there’s actually a lady at the counter. He’s just got the keys as John and Dean enter. Dean’s lips are wet and glistening, eyelashes seem even darker; Sam looks away before it starts to hurt and they venture down the corridor, Dean shaking his head like a dog to fleck Sam with rain and Sam putting up an expected protest, shoving him away and calling him an animal, Dean just smiling, John grumbling.

They enter the room and Sam’s given first shower, but Dean and John have glints in their eyes that tell Sam that they’re going to break into the rooms further down to get themselves clean. Sam retreats into the bathroom and strips down as if it can rebuild him and take him away, turns the shower onto scalding and stands there because at some point his dick has stirred a little just from _looking_ at Dean.

Sometimes he imagines happy days where they’ve grown older together and Dean is smiling at him with crinkles around his eyes and casually leaning over a diner table to plant a kiss at the corner of his mouth without caring who sees. Jo and Ellen and even Bobby catching them but accepting that their love is how it should be.

But today he imagines Dean dying. He’s split open on a wendigo’s claw from stomach up, blood draining, face pale white, the monster’s body mutilated from a flare’s blast a little while away. Raining, because Sam’s sky’s always black-coal, in a forest where the moonlight trickles through the mottled canopy to cast bars. Sam’s dropping to his knees and running a flood of denial, hands delving into the mess of Dean’s intestines spilling out, trying to put Dean back, piece his brother back together like a broken patchwork doll. “No, no, Dean, please, answer me,” Sam sobs. He lurches forwards, clutching Dean’s face in his hands just like he’d always wanted. “You can’t– I _love_ you, Dean, please, _answer_ me!” Dean’s eyes would fill with a dreadful darkness, a flash of horror. Then, they’d close.

The moon leers at Sam from above, the bodies smile at him from where they lie; He feels something inside him shifting, straining. He wouldn’t stumble back to the Impala; he’d do it right there, fumble out the gun from his hip and–

He’s still in the shower. The heat makes his skin numb to everything, even his tears, and he shuts it off gratefully and dries himself off with a detachment spreading out from his lungs. In the same precise moment he steps out of the bathroom, the main door opens as well, Dean walking in freshly washed and cracking a yawn. If they were really on the same brainwave as everyone says, Dean would know. When tips his head to wag an eyebrow at him, grin as if he’s actually happy to be around Sam, he’d fucking _know it_ in the back of his mind and he’d _go_. Leave Sam behind for the crows (they’d peck out his eyes because he shouldn’t be looking at Dean like this, in throes, enthralled.)

... But Sam shudders and turns his attentions around to where the motel is actually nicer than expected: a deck out front and rain drizzling down sliding glass doors behind the curtains, a television set that Dean’s already turned on and slumped in an armchair to watch, an actual _microwave_ at the bar. It bewilders Sam how something from the outside so frayed and faded is one of the best places they’ve stayed.

An hour later Sam’s slumped in bed, curled up, watching the room through lidded eyes. John is out and snoring in the other, Dean still in the armchair, lights are turned off, just some blueness from the screen cast across Dean’s face. When Dean goes to sleep he’ll slip in next to Sam on the other half of the bed that’s always been reserved for him. For now Sam curls up further and tucks his hand under the pillow where his gun lies, safety on, ready. Always sleep with a gun under the pillow, a knife jammed into the space beside, between the bedframe and the mattress and his heartbeat rattling one, two, three, too fast. His phone’s charging on the bedside table, the lamp’s off, clock glowing red, tissue box all floral, and the television’s on mute, Dean watching over him in a silent vigil; they’re living through another day of rinse, repeat, shoot.

He wakes sometime in the night feeling restless. Room’s dark now, light spilling out from behind the curtains. Dean’s fallen asleep in the chair. Idiot. Everything is softer in the dark, but his thoughts seem to be running around, worried about something, chewing on themselves, tense about the future because Sam knows he can’t keep living like this — he’s got to leave someday, before Dean catches on and mauls his heart into shreds.

The curtains part for him almost silently. The light is shocking. The clock reads 2:41 but the sky seems too bright to be true, all clouds grey instead of black and he can see the deck spanning out in front of him, flowers coiling up the banisters, where further beyond there’s gravel in the grass and trees and the path leads up to a hill and a cliff that falls into the ocean. How can it be brighter out there than in here? Sam unlocks the door, pulling it open so he can feel the outside. The wind comes first, pure in ways he doesn’t understand, raising goosebumps in his skin. He’s here. In the now. And these thoughts of his need to calm down. Sound reaches him next: cars on distant roads, ocean heaving somewhere out there, crickets and rustling leaves and grass.

He’s got his phone. Turn on the flashlight, set it to red, flash it at the flower. It doesn’t react. Of course it won’t — what was he expecting? Photoperiodism doesn’t work like that. Maybe he’s too eager to try to dissociate himself from his family, from his father, from Dean, from hunting and whatever it is they do, bring himself back somehow with science Dean scorns and says will never help them find Mary’s killer and the truth.

Instinctively, maybe, his head tips upwards where the clouds are gathering in swathes of grey. Muscles in him unlock, relax; he hadn’t even been aware of how his shoulders had knotted up until now. He breathes for the first time in a long while, and that terribleness in him is released. Then something moves behind him and his knife is in his hand and ready, but the warmth all up his back tells him it’s just Dean. Sam can’t suppress his shiver.

“You should go to bed,” Sam murmurs to him when Dean does not speak, wonders how close his face would be to Dean’s if he turned.

“And leave you here to get mope and cold? Jeez, Sammy, you’re shivering.”

A long-suffering sigh, from Sam. No point staying out longer — he can’t get any peace if he knows Dean’s awake and thinking about him. He retreats back into the warmth of the room and closes the door, locks it, lets the curtains fall back in place and Dean is sliding under the covers, stretching and rolling his shoulders after hunched in that chair. Sam stops by it before he goes around to his side and lifts the cushion of the chair.

Dean’s gun is there.

Sam slots his knife back into place and puts his phone back on the nightstand as he sits onto the bed. “Dean,” he says, quietly. When his brother looks up, it takes Sam’s breath away as always. No matter where, no matter with whom Dean’s been spending the rest of the day, or days, or week with, this is where he ends up. With Sam.

Sam clings onto it like a feeble hope, but his rope’s fraying.

The gun is extended grip-first as some sort of offering, a plea, a silent acknowledgement that Sam _knows_ Dean went and sat in that chair and put his gun under it fully aware that he was going to sleep not in the bed, but there. Dean wraps his fingers around it and takes, smiling up at him like _funny eh, Sammy?_ Sam tries to smile back. God knows he failed.

*

Under the rainless daylight, the town is different. Sam has to admit that his first impression might’ve been wrong: there are people on the streets, filling it up with chatter that drifts and lifts something up; a solemnity that shrouded the buildings seems to have been released.

John signs him up to school and then the man’s gone, off to find the shifter in the woods living a day’s trek out of here while Sam sits in class and feels brain-dead after taking too many placement tests where the top class is still absolute trash. The kids who are trying hard sit at the front and talk to the teacher, but they’re too dull to understand concepts quick enough, too dull to be thorough, while others couldn’t care less and they’re making chitchat or sleeping. Sam hates this sort of class learning where knowledge comes at the rate of the least intelligent child.

Once they’d stopped at a school where the system was an elaborate set of worksheets and pretests and mastery tests, each child for their own, the teacher an overseer. Sam had never flourished as much since.

Instead he hunches over at his desk, looks out the window and wonders where’s Dean, what’s he doing, how’s he feeling. Remembers what Dean’d been like when he used to go to school: skipping classes or fidgeting the whole way through, uncomfortable because he belonged out on the streets or in a goddamn jungle, prowling, a royal feline silent in the undergrowth.

If someone asked Sam why he enjoys going, he’d be hard-pressed to answer. Superficially it’s something he can do well, something that gives him clear orders that’s working towards a systematic goal of getting a profession and bettering the world, neatly categorised and organised in subjects and topics and subtopics and credits. A relief from hunting. Something that’s easy. A change. Won’t get him killed.

Rationally, that’s sound logic. School is safe. But he can’t help feeling like it makes him some kind of coward. Dean would be ashamed.

The teacher asks for the roots of a polynomial. One of the coefficients is imaginary, but someone yells out complex conjugates and Sam fights back a groan. If it weren’t for hunting, would he even like this? If it weren’t for hunting, would he even be here at all? If it weren’t for hunting, would he still love Dean?

An implausible scenario: Sam and Dean just regular brothers. Sam sees Dean around rarely because he’s off partying most days and never in school and wasting his life away in a bottle and between girls’ thighs. Sam has nothing but distaste for Dean, distaste born from disapproval of his lifestyle.

But Sam imagines that one day then he’ll walk into a club, fall in love with a man who’s surrounded by ladies on the dance floor and then realise it’s his brother.

If it weren’t for Dean, would Sam even be hunting?

Sam needs to leave, but he _doesn’t_ because he lives for the scraps of affection Dean tosses down so carelessly as if there are no crowds clamouring for them. Sam’s heart is so weak.

Come lunchtime and the school is buzzing about them, the newcomers. He can’t count how many girls have approached him in attempt to weasel out Dean’s number. Sam would never let them anywhere near. He loathes them, and he loathes how loathing them is so wrong because they make Dean happy, he should be letting Dean get what he wants, for fuck’s sake. Dean has looked after him all these years and Sam keeps wanting more, wanting everything. Greedy thing. Midas might have a golden heart but it’s all cold and stone inside.

Dean is brightest light you’ll ever see, stare too long (like Sam) and you’ll go blind because nothing else seems to compare. Forget that there’s another boy tottering at his side.

Sam, by contrast, is undesirable. Dean says it’s his bitchy face, his closed-off demeanour, the way he’s started to shut down, engines off, main systems broken beyond repair. Once upon a time Sam was a quivering ball of energy and positivity, flashing dimples at everyone he met and making friends wherever he went. Sam doesn’t believe in that anymore. The world is breaking down, he thinks.

The spoon the cafeteria’s given him is silver, almost as if they’ve got some idea of the shifter out there. Sometimes _Sam_ feels like the shifter in their midst, pretending to be human, except shifters do a better job and they might even be more human than Sam because these feelings and thoughts of Sam’s are in no world ‘human’.

Another possible scenario: Dean has his finger on the trigger and the barrel at the roof of his mouth. He stares up to the ceiling, sightless. He is not crying. Sam’s Dean does not cry, not even when he is about to take his own life.

Sam walks in. Dean pauses. Sam begins to weep, plead, step closer and gently try take the gun away, but _it_ slips out of his mouth, slick and traitorous, blackened by hell. The truth and the twistedness of it. Dean doesn’t hesitate. He shoots. Red spray, into Sam’s mouth, his eyes. Sam pries the gun from the stiffness of Dean’s hands and _howls_ , closes his own jaw around it where the metal is still warm from his brother’s lips and his brother’s grip.

His spoon falls with a clatter, the chair scrapes — Sam is leaving with his hand over his mouth and his body shaking because he can’t keep thinking like this anymore. It’s never been so bad before but his mind’s running away with his sanity in tow, he’s so damn weak inside that even his love is acidulous enough to burn its way through, from his ears through his stomach to his toes. Pull out everything in him and heave it onto the floor in a splatter.

Sam’s love is a beast with a hollow ribcage for a heart and thousand of sets of teeth. It has no ending where they survive. The only right thing about it all is that Sam keeps it in himself and never lets it loose upon the good world.

The nurse accepts that he’s feeling unwell. Sam does the worst thing he can do and he leaves to go looking for the only thing that will ever matter to him. Hate rises from the concrete and pulls at him as he walks, hungry, grasping hands. He should not be looking for Dean. There is nothing Dean would be doing right now that Sam would be happy to see.

Sometimes Sam wonders if he’s delusional, if he’s not actually Dean’s brother, if one day he saw a cute little boy called Sammy and he saw the most beautiful boy in the world, and he took the first brown-haired boy into an alley into the dark and told him to just close his eyes and breathe, then slit his throat and carefully, lovingly, peeled off his skin and pulled it over himself — something grotesque, pale and bloated, a maggot, a corpse — and walked back to the most beautiful boy in the world and lived there in his arms ever since.

He can’t breathe. It’s never been so bad. His thoughts have never gone so far. He can still hear the screams of little Sammy being peeled open.

His path switches like a railway track and he’s heading to the motel room instead, ready to pack his bags. He’s leaving, leaving for the sunrise, wherever, he’s leaving anywhere as long as it’s somewhere that’s not here, maybe in the soil of a grave or right to the cliffs of the depraved, maybe just down the road — he’ll walk forever if he has to —, hitchhike, live the rest of his life on scraps and floating on the ocean as debris, something lost, a rat that’s bitten off its tail to be free.

He rattles the key in the lock thinking of the way he’ll go and leave without seeing Dean. He can’t have his will tested like that; last time he tried they’d been a million miles away, Sam shaking after Dean had left him alone, sitting in the bed with at home with no one just because Dean wanted to go to the fucking prom, and Sam’d jokingly (honestly, really,) suggested Dean go as his date and Dean’d _laughed_. Said he had ten other girls ask him already, Samantha, better luck next time.

Sam had changed his mind after he saw Dean coming home early. It was stupid in retrospect, unfair on Dean, thinking leaving because Sam couldn’t handle a joke.

There is a girl _on his bed._

Rage floods his eyes and for a moment the world is all upside down, inside out _,_ her insides are stretching across the floor and connected web-like to a network of flesh looming over the streets, a huge monstrous creature bulging with eyes and hair and teeth and breasts and lips and pink, that which takes Dean from him; and the bed is dead wood and someone’s killed themselves here before, a traveller at the end of his road; the–

–the beast of flesh turns as if smelling him, and his stomach locks with dread and his feet are fastened to the floor its hundred eyes roll in their thousand sockets to–

The world snaps back into place, she writhes and squirms and throws her head back because Dean’s kneeling between her spread thighs, thumb working over her clit, mouth sucking and laving and eating her out with gusto.

Sam does not close the door and leave; he _slams_ it and the floor shakes and webs shatter across the frame and his heart beats a machine gun in his chest, and then he’s moving with hardened steel over his eyes into the dark shade of the wall beside, standing, watching, waiting in the depths.

 _Try me,_ he thinks, and then, _God, why am I like this?_ but it coils there in his chest anyway, so dark and ugly, and the door is flying open again as if in a challenge and girl is out of there, shooting him a dirty look and skeptical eyebrows as if to say _Really? Brat._

But in the moment when she walks past with her shoes held in her hand and her hair rucked up and her skirt still rumpled, the world seems to slow, Sam seeing the road ahead of him in clarity, seeing it all: he’s a masochist and a killer and a too-young sinner, displaced and far away and out of space to breathe _..._ one last gig, one last act to protect Dean (because that girl can’t be normal, she can’t) and then he’ll be gone. He’ll leave like a wounded animal and bleed all across the country in little splatters and drips.

Still breathless with this revelation, Sam enters, but Dean is not pleased. He says from his place by the bed, “What the _hell,_ Sammy?”

“Oh,” Sam says with feigned light-heartedness. “I didn’t mean to close it that hard.” Dean is watching him incredulously, bewildered as to why his brother’s such a little _bitch._ “What?” asks Sam. “So you fuck girls before I usually come home. Am I supposed to see this as subversion or appeasement?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean spits, and worse of all is that he’s still beautiful, “because it’s all about you, isn’t it?”

Can’t help but feel the echo of all those numbers for Dean Sam had turned down, his thoughts about he _shouldn’t’ve,_ and his sharp snappish retort falls short on his tongue. Sam stands there feeling foolish, instead, because all his defenses fall short when faced with Dean. Maybe he isn’t doing anything for Dean at all. Maybe he really is just a brat.

“Sam?” Dean asks, a little more tentatively, because Sam’s been silent for a moment too long.

“Okay,” Sam says, turning his face away. “I– I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,” trembling, from head to toe, brittle leaf clinging to a branch, “interrupted, I guess.”

“Sammy?” Dean says, coming closer, because what Dean sees now is a little five-year-old boy, the same one that he’d looked after all his life, not this stubborn, too-fast-growing, _wretched_ Sam.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” Sam says, and realises how true that is. “I thought I saw something outside. I keep... _thinking_ things.”

“Thinking what?”

Nothing. A beat. “... It’s dangerous, Dean, can’t you promise me that you’re not going to go out with her anymore?” He looks up, “Dean? Dean?”

“Did you get cursed?” Dean’s wide hands are on his shoulders, patting him down as if he’d _feel_ a curse and feel if there was something wrong with his little Sammy. “Is there some sort of spell on you? Did you meet anyone dodgy, Sam, did they thrall you?”

“No!” Sam pulls away from his grasp, but the touch lingers like a hot brand. Sam imagines it’s written in scars all under his skin, _Dean Dean Dean Dean_ , pressing upwards and outwards to greet his brother’s touch _._ “There’s nothing on me, Dean, why don’t you believe me?”

Dean hesitates a heartbeat too long. Sam knows why. It’s not difficult to see that Sam’s breaking down the edges, cracking. But Dean will be loyal. He won’t tell John, he knows things are poorly and frail when it comes to Sam and his father.

“I’m going out for dinner,” Sam lies, trying to hide the sting in his voice, “someone’s asked me to eat. Don’t wait up.”

*

When the library has long closed its doors and it’s grown too dark outside for Sam to continue reading the book he’d stolen, he returns, pushing open the door so that a sliver of light sweeps wide into a swath and Sam shuts the door softly and blindly makes his way to the lamp that sits between the two beds, flicking it on and looking over to where the other blankets are empty, then falling to mattress, toeing his shoes off, putting the book under his bed.

The amulet is on the bedside dresser — Dean takes it off when he fucks women. It’s nothing new. He’s probably gone to finish what he started with that girl. He didn’t promise Sam, after all.

He hates avoiding Dean, hates getting into arguments with him, hates the idea of leaving when they’re still upset with each other, because Dean will carry it forever on his back and grow hunched and old with it still attached to him like a tumor. So will Sam, but how Sam seems to feel these days seems to be taking too much weight. Maybe Dean is right and Sam is much too selfish. Thinks only about himself and how he can’t handle it.

He’s down to his undershirt when a shadow falls across the room faster than he can blink, there’s someone moving outside, and it vanishes but in one swift movement he’s racing after it, knife tucked into the back of his pants and sliding the door open and flinging his bare feet onto the deck and vaulting over the railing because he sees a dark figure disappearing into the trees nearby.

Sam’s got to find this goddamn shadow because there’s something wrong with this town, it’s poisoning him.

The grass is cold, stones cut his feet but he runs, because something is out there. Twigs and branches are snapped somewhere in the dark, the wind bites at him, a second pair of footsteps are ahead and Sam yells “ _Stop!_ ”

He leaps over a fallen log and crashes into a back, warm, muscles, eerily familiar. Hazel eyes turn at him, lips parted, in a shirt and jeans which should be impossible, what the fuck, Sam stumbles away with his silver knife held ahead of him while the trees around him seem to warp and distort, welcoming him, inviting him in with crooked fingers. He is staring at _himself_ , the darkness falling around them like the moonlight, the crickets fallen silent and the cars too far to be heard.

“I’ll show you it,” the Sam says, “and we’ll die together.”

Before he can say a word, the mirror image of him is disappearing into the undergrowth once more and Sam sprints after him, slapped at by branches, his lungs too bloated in his chest. It’s him, he realises. It’s him. It’s him. He just doesn’t know which part of him it is. If Sam feels so toxic and twisted, is this Sam the good of him?

The trees fall away to the cliff’s edge, stars bursting out in unfathomable thousands and hundreds and millions, blue and black and greys of the sea that bellows below and crashes in surges, and there two figures at the edge of the world, holding onto each other with hands roaming over bare shoulders and hips and pulling each other close, mouths over mouths, at one with the gale around them and the impossibility of the sky.

The other Sam is gone, the soil sinks beneath his feet, giving way to sand and gravel and grass and the billions of creatures that live underneath. Neither of the two notice him as he climbs, wind roaring around him, hair picked up and tossed in a storm. “Dean,” he whispers, to himself, then, “ _Dean!!_ ”

The woman in his arms stops, turns to look, and the moonlight slants across her face and her retinas flare, glow a pure white. Sam is suddenly there, _right there,_ close enough that he can see every freckle across Dean’s face and the shock across his eyes. He does what’s been baying in his blood, what’s been building in him like a terrible sin, he crunches his knife between her ribs and when she’s still shocked he pushes her back towards the cliff-ledge. She begins to gurgle. It sprays over his throat and his face, over his shirt, and he shoves her with all the strength he has in his arms until she slips and her foot catches on the ledge before she is gone.

“Sam–” he hears behind him.

“You went with a _shifter!_ ” Sam screams, face smeared with blood. Her body’s spiralling, spiralling, smashed all the way down there on the rocks, just a speck. He’s killed someone, something, there’s a difference, that’s what John always says, even though Sam swears he never wants to be like John. “I told you to promise me, and you, you _went_. Didn’t you even goddamn check?”

“I did,” Dean says, thumbing his silver ring, shock only just fading, “it didn’t react, Sammy, I swear.”

He stalks back to Dean, up into his space, trying to ignore the way Dean’s chest is all bare and his jean’s fly is popped open, the way the moonlight glances off Dean’s skin and Sam wants to lick each inch of it. “I don’t believe that. God,” he says, “fuck you, really, Dean, fuck you. What- what the hell is it with you and women? Can’t you keep it in your goddamn pants?”

“Me and women?” Dean demands. “I take what I can get, Sammy, that’s what it is.”

“What?” Sam says, wiping at his face with his shirt because he needs an excuse not to look at Dean, not when Dean’s eyes are dark like that and his voice’s dropped an octave. “Dean, you get _everything_ because there’s not one person who doesn’t want you.” If the last part comes out too bitter, Sam ignores it.

Dean’s not saying anything. Sam looks up for an answer, but suddenly Dean’s filled his vision and warm lips are pressing over his and Sam’s mouth falls open automatically the way he always opens up for his brother, tilting his head and eyes fluttering closed, and a fire starts in his chest when Dean swallows his gasp. As they break away, Sam’s shirt is tugged away over his head and Dean’s murmuring about how beautiful he is, how soft he is, how much Dean fucking loves him, he’s so gorgeous, nothing better, Dean’s wanted him deep down in the darkest place of him, oh god.

The wind’s cold and raises his nipples taut and when Dean plucks at them he cries out, arching his chest into Dean’s warm wet reverent mouth that licks and nibbles and trails its way down to the fly of his jeans, flicking the button open and tugging down the zipper and mouthing at the wet patch that’s already pushing insistently through Sam’s underwear.

Dean looks up at him, and Sam nearly creams himself at the sight of Dean on his knees in front of _Sam,_ legs giving way, but Dean grabs him by the ass and holds him steady, nosing and pressing open-mouthed kisses against Sam’s dick through his underwear, glancing at Sam with a grin in his eyes as the moonlight casts itself white across his lashes and his dark-green.

Sam lets out a noise like a sob, then he grabs the knife that’s still jutting out of his back pocket and sinks it right between the shifter’s eyes. It hisses when it cleaves into Dean’s skull, burning his bones and melting the flesh around it, blistering it red.

A cry rips through the air and to the very core of Sam, a howl of loss, of heartbreak, the sound that festers in him on every given day — the other shifter that’s still wearing his face is wailing from the trees and it’s stumbling, clutching at its chest, making broken, broken, noises.

Sam drops the knife, spreads his arms because suddenly he can imagine no more fitting a way to die. Its eyes flash to him as it hears the silver fall to the earth, entirely inhuman, pale and sickly and Sam _knows_ this is what he’ll look like if Dean ever dies.

“Sa-am,” it whines, long and drawn-out, stumbling towards him, his death on his own two feet, as it always were, “Sam, Sam, you killed him.”

“I didn’t,” Sam says, quivering with bottled-up emotion, “he’s still safe, somewhere.”

“Sam.” Its cheeks are wet, which should be impossible. It should be a monster. “Sam, you killed the only part of him that would ever want you back. Don’t you realise we’re on cursed land? It brings out the monsters in us. He’ll never want us back.”

“I don’t want something fake like that,” Sam says.

“Don’t you?” He can see it now, in clarity. Its eyes slide through a spectrum of grey and green and brown and blue like a storm. “It’s the only way we’ll get it, our one true heaven.”

If Sam went to Heaven — which he wouldn’t, he would never — he wouldn’t want it either. He wouldn’t want his one kiss with a monster seen on repeat. He wouldn’t want to have a Dean that doesn’t exist holding him as if he’s loved. If Sam went to Heaven and he forgot all about this world and he really believed that it was _Dean_ there, loving him, he wouldn’t want it, because Sam never lived pipe dreams. Sam takes the brutal truth and moves on, living with the wounds, away from what which harms him, but Sam will never, _ever_ give up and pretend it’s all alright.

He realises just like that that he doesn’t want to go to Hell. He doesn’t want to die. No one wants to die. Even if living is torture.

“Sam!” he hears somewhere in the distance, and he’s not sure if it’s death calling to him from beyond the veil.

The shifter in front of him lunges suddenly, all semblances of mourning gone and only a beast now, teeth snapping, those bones suddenly sharp and gnashing and Sam doesn’t have his knife anymore, it’s too close, fear rears its head because _he doesn’t want to die, no!_ He falls back towards the ledge, it’s leaping up to him, maw gaped wide, and god, it doesn’t look like him at all, he doesn’t look like that, he’s never looked like that, this is all wrong, this is all so wrong... Sam is broken, he’s a shattered porcelain doll on old dusty shelves, he’s a withered sapling, he’s broken and weak after so many years of loving the abyss, but he’s not this. No person looks like that. No person is grotesque like a squirming maggot and no person would’ve taken a little boy and killed him in an alley and stole his skin and lived in him forever.

Sam holds his head and screams as pain lances through, the world opens up again, innards and organs spreading everywhere, the shifter’s attached back to the impossible mass of bodies in the distance on sinews like puppet strings and the pain crests too high, the entire world rocks and _bursts._

“Sam?!” he hears, somewhere. “Sam?! _Sam_!!”

Dean, suddenly. Above him. Where’s the shifter? Sam is looking up from a well. There’s blood pooling from his nose and his ears and he can taste it spilling over his tongue.

The sky righting itself, the wind, he hears it all again. Dean helps him up, puts an arm over him, and suddenly Sam can’t understand how he could’ve ever mistaken a shifter for Dean. Dean’s so gentle yet steadying; so reverent yet steadfast in his confidence of where he is, who he is; eyes carrying years and years of experience and a heart full of concern. Sam slurs something, he’s not sure, only that his mouth is moving and Dean’s eyes look wet as he says, “I know, Sammy, I know, I- We’ll get you back and safe, okay? You’ll think more clearly then. C’mon, Sammy.”

“Your ring, Dean,” Sam says, and Dean’s got to have noticed that Sam’s shirtless and his jeans are undone, but Dean doesn’t say anything about it, too busy running his hands over Sam’s shoulders and checking him for injuries, holding him and trying to wipe away the blood that keeps dripping from him. “I left it out there, it’s yours, and I left it out there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dean says. “Hang in there for me, okay? Sam, you hear me?”

“Your ring didn’t work,” he says, mind still muddy and blurry. “Monsters are stronger here. I was strong too– does that mean– does that mean–”

“No, no, never,” Dean says in a rush.

“Okay,” Sam says, and they’ve reached the deck, and they left the glass door unlocked and Dean’s pushing him back to his bed, tugging at his jeans, “I believe you, Dean, because you’re always right,” and he means it, earnestly, genuinely.

Dean’s movements halt and he blanches pale as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Sam... we’ll talk in the morning, okay? Sleep. Sleep, I’ll be here.”

“Okay,” Sam says, and he’s already in bed because Dean’s the best brother there ever will be and he’s already stripped Sam down and tucked him away, to sleep.

*

On morning’s arrival and beck and call, Sam jerks awake and clear-headed because their cellphone is shrieking, Dean’s jolting up and lifting him as he goes because Dean’s bare arm is looped around his waist, leg tangled with his, Sam’s head is resting on his chest listening to the steady thump-thump of his heart.

Sam’s head feels a thousand times lighter, and he’s not sure if that’s because whatever darkness hanging over this town is gone or if it’s all on himself. He’ll never give up like that again, never think like that again. No matter what. There is grief, and there is _madness._

“Boys!” comes John’s sharp bark from the speakers.

“We’re alive.” Dean’s arm tightens around Sam. Sam has forgotten how to breathe.

“I find something about that hard to fucking believe,” John says. “An hour, boys, I’ll be outside the motel.”

“Yes sir,” Dean says, then flips the cell shut and he’s struggling out from the covers, pulling a wide-eyed Sam after him.

“What?”

“C’mon, don’t you wanna grab some good stuff before we leave?”

“What do you mean? Dean! Let me put on _pants!_ ”

“No one’s gonna see,” Dean says, throwing open the door, and they’re both practically naked, what are they doing? This is public indecency.

“Dean!”

“Just you wait, Sammy, I got something to show you. Saw it when I went out to grab some grub yesterday night.”

There’s no one at the motel desk, and Dean pushes open the doors to bright blinding sunlight, the smell of a fresh new day and horizons, and Sam’s following along holding onto the reassurance that at least if people see them, Dean’s wearing just as little, but he stops when he sees that the cars are frozen on the streets, that people are lying on the footpaths, everything silent, trash rattling down the long stretch of road, birds scattering at their approach and a raccoon darting away from a body it was beginning to bite into.

“I bet the bakery still has something warm,” Dean says happily, but Sam’s frozen because there’s the old lady he saw on the first day, lying there with her eyes pecked out by hungry birds, white bleeding into red. “Sammy?”

“Oh, god,” Sam says.

“We’re gonna tell dad that I poisoned the water with silver, a’ight? And we gotta get outta town soon as we can, ‘cause it’ll be pretty obvious that I didn’t. Sam?”

Sam is afraid. There’s no doubt in his mind that he did this. Why isn’t Dean running? Why isn’t Dean shoving him to the ground and pressing iron to his throat?

“Sammy?” Big eyes, concerned. “You okay? I mean, I guess we’re not telling dad you did this, but you can choose to if you want to.”

“Dean... did you see what happened on that clifftop?”

Dean shakes his head, “Nah, Sam, I was chasing shifters all night. Some of them, they.” His eyes go unfocused. “They were real ghosts, they were.” Then his gaze falls back to Sam. “Why? You got something to tell me?

“No,” Sam says after a breath too long, nearly raising a hand to his mouth where he swears he can still taste the faintest trace of Dean. “It’s nothing, Dean. Don’t worry.”

Dean’s watching him, scrutinising. The sun is rising behind him and breaking through the clouds like a red-orange lance shattering the ice-blue of the sky. He swallows, shallowly, never taking his eyes off Sam, tongue darting out for a moment to wet his lip. Sam’s eye catches.

“Sure,” Dean says, and they go on their way.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Some more present tense. Might make a series out of pining!Sam. This one would be probably near the end of the instalment, though. 
> 
> kinda unedited


End file.
